Salvation

“Sometimes, I feel like a child; wishful for a passing star to deliver my hellos to you. But some days are harder...” he croaked, feeling these other days in his bones, urging him to mention their existence mercilessly. “Some days I could do nothing but feel how fraying my bones have become when I wasn’t even twenty. They made me feel how much of a grown up I am, and wish beyond anything that I remained the child hiding in the cupboard once more, just to escape these traitorous days goading me into joining you all. It’s just—” he stopped, biting his lower lip and subconsciously hearing the fallacious assuring voice that his mind supplied.

No judgement. None now. 

“Being so close that time from death; feeling you, and all of them there, it made me perceive death for what it really is. I no longer shy away from it as if it is some sort of unnatural cause. I understand what you told me about it being quicker and easier than falling asleep, and for a long time I would have given anything to just feel its serene greeting once more. A greeting of an old.. friend.” he finished, a faraway look in his eyes, understanding the irony of it all and smiling.

“But.. I don’t feel like this anymore,” he continued, looking up to the wavering veil and directly addressing its greys. “I no longer want to die, even if sometimes I don’t want to live, too. I’m in a veil of my own; fluttering in its in-between.”

“I sometimes feel like ever since the war had ended, everything started to settle down and peace started to reign,” he said, nervously adjusting his glasses back in place. “Everyone needed some time to grieve and get a hold on their lives once more. But I completely detached from it all. I barely even remember what a rush of adrenaline feels like. I steered away from any stressful jobs. I just couldn’t anymore, you know? I just wanted to feel untroubled, even if for a little while, but I got so used to this calmness that I don't know how to react when I’m asked to be The Boy Who Saves again. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I would leave the world ablaze but... I just can’t. I just can’t. I’ve had enough—”

Suddenly, he wasn’t crouching against the veil anymore, but was transported to his old headmaster’s office where he had once expressed his grief through these same words while wrecking havoc. In effortless practice, he completed, “I have seen enough. I wanted it to end. I wanted everything to end. Or maybe I just wanted myself to end.”

He stopped, and a moment later, he voiced his same words of defeat, this time with resignation instead of rage. “I just didn’t want to fight anymore.”

He didn’t come with the intention of crying. At this point, it was pointless. All of it was pointless, for what would crying or even talking matter in his situation? They wouldn’t bring anyone back, even if his tears weighted a whole ocean or his words the seven skies. It just wouldn’t matter.

But the tear that dropped from his eye didn’t care, and it only invited its companions with the broken words he reconvened with.

“I miss you. I miss everything about you so much that I can’t bear the weight of it sometimes. I’m a lost soul without you by my side. You have the people I love with you, and I still miss no one else like I miss you. I miss your voice, your fire talks, your recklessness that used to frustrate me beyond imagination, your way of saying my name and... and simply you. I miss the way you lived.”

“And there’s nothing left of you,” he confessed brokenly. “You’re slowly fading away more and it shatters my ruined heart. We rarely got any time together and it pains me that I took you for granted. It pains me so much that I wasn’t the relative you deserved. You lived a life of suffering and I never even eased it. I only added to it, for I was the reason you were locked up, and I was the reason you lived your last days in misery, and I was the reason that brought you to your doom, no matter how long it has been since I’ve accepted that it’s not on my hands alone. But fact still remains; my presence affected you in reverse.”

He then stopped, and couldn't do more than take off his tear-stained glasses before properly sobbing in his own arms. With every shudder he felt the years of pain and misery he had lived. He felt the anguish he hadn't known how to let go of in his young age after losing the closest person to him. He felt everything vividly this time, no numbness nor denial, and he could swear a phantom of touch was there around his shoulders, keeping him together.

“Just.. just stay with me, because no one else should stay,” he stated with finality bordering on factuality after his cries had rescinded, brushing off the fallen warriors from his face, wishing he would never lose the sense of being the one in charge of letting them out. “No one else should endure staying with someone as broken beyond repair as I am no matter how much they say otherwise. I thought your death will teach me something, will give me some hope to go on in a way, but it is all fading away as well, and I am doing my absolute best to stop my desperate urge to just follow you wherever you are. For I am but a lonely saviour of a world without my own. I didn't wish for all this greatness thrust into my life; I just wanted happiness, and now I realise I only utterly had it when you were with me.”

•|∆